My name is Ashley Heo — I do have a Korean name which is Seoyeong, but nobody seems to pronounce it correctly. I am from South Korea, not North Korea, and I am a communication design major. I love watching movies and listening to music, and although somewhat disagree, people say that I am really into drawing.
For my final project, I selected an artist I found interesting and wrote fictional journal entries for Seminar and made those journal entries into a physical fictional journal. When I first heard that we were doing this project, I had an internal conflict within my mind. I like the idea of making books, but writing journal entries were not something that captivated me at first sight. I do not keep a journal and I hate the thought of recording my personal life on something that can be readable by someone else. I simply like to literally “think” about it. So I think this is the reason why the idea of writing a journal was not intriguing to me compared to my other projects. But somehow I had to go through this and I began to write a journal from the perspectives of Gustav Klimt.
I originally wanted to research on Monet. But Rachel asked us to research on someone that we were not familiar about, so I changed to Egon Schiele. Having my mind set on Egon Schiele, I went to visit the Neue Galerie where Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt’s artworks were exhibited. But as I was wandering inside Schiele’s artistic mind, I found him too dark and gloomy, which was somewhat similar to my mindset. I felt like if I dived into this melancholy person, I would not be able to write from the perspectives of Schiele, but simply write depressing thoughts. That is when the colourful Gustav Klimt’s works came to my eyes. I didn’t necessarily like his art or had any opinions on his art, but I felt like for my final project, I should do something different and breakthrough from my comfort zone. So I decided to work on Gustav Klimt, but still keeping an essence of Egon Schiele.
So for the entries, I set the time period to the year of 1907 when Gustav Klimt first met young Egon Schiele. As I was researching on what happened to Gustav Klimt in 1907, I found out that he began on drawing his masterpiece, The Kiss in this year and that the muse for this painting is rumoured to be Emilie Flöge, Klimt’s long friend and maybe lover. Drawing from this rumour, I decided to write a journal entry that contained Klimt’s thought on Emilie and how he wants to capture her beauty in his painting, which eventually turns into The Kiss.
After researching and planning, I decided to make a journal of the first seven days of Gustav Klimt in July 1907. The big structure for the journal was based on facts, but since I couldn’t find sources that reflected Gustav Klimt’s mind other than his artworks, I fictionalised his mind. This process was more interesting than I have expected as I was able to somehow manipulate the thoughts of this great artist.
After writing all of my journals, I found images and reference photos for my fictional journal for Studio. I used some photos of Gustav Klimt’s works and for the drawings of Emilie Flöge, I drew them myself thinking how Klimt would have felt drawing this for his dearest Emilie. I also included a Japanese Ukiyo-e print as a gift from Emilie and a portrait of Egon Schiele given to Klimt when they first met.
From the beginning, I envisioned how my book would look like, so the technical part was not a problem for me. As I was working on this project, I was also making a book at my Time class and I wanted to use the same technique for my fictional journal. I mainly used Citrasolv transfer on thin Sumi-e Japanese paper and used suede leather for the cover. I also bound the book in a Japanese stab binding style to show Klimt’s influence from Japanese art.
The overall process was very interesting and I really like the final piece I made. Through this project, I got to know more about what lied beneath the beautiful paintings of Gustav Klimt and was able to imagine his life back in the 1900s. Among all of my projects from this class, I love this project the most because along with my Time class, it may me realise my passion for bookmaking. Although I am not sure if this project has any relation to my previous works, I still think that eventually my thinking process and everything builded up to creating this project. Now I have a goal. I am going to make more books just for pleasure and my personal growth.
